Friday, November 09, 2012

the user illusion

When I stick the biberon in poor Adam’s mouth, quieting his
protests (at having to face another day scanning this strange planet, perhaps)
and getting him into the rhythm of sucking down formula (yes, Le Leche league –
we are incorrigible half and halfers. Wanna make something of it?), I have a
long time – or at least a couple hundred gulps of time – to study his face.

It is interesting how many people like to tell you that the
expressions mean nothing – just a galvanic movement, a tropism. While we all
recognize the cry and even grant it some symbolic status – cry equals pain –
the smile, or the laugh, are definitely secondary properties, or so the common
wisdom goes. Pain is fundamental, humor – which requires a minimal capacity to
compare and contrast – is second stage, and if you live long enough, it will be
jettisoned and there you’ll be, back to crying and peeing in your bed in some
old folks home. Yes, we orbit around pain, our black sun, and smile first as a
trick of synaptic firings, and then as a control mechanism that mediates pain.

I’m reminded of the “user illusion” that the computer
designers talk about. We sit down and look at the screen and see files and
docs, and we think of files as being cardboard, and docs as being paper, and writing
as being the application of an instrument to a surface. But this surface
appearance is a delusion – it is algorithms all the way down, schmuck.
Similarly, we glance about us, we are bright, we are alert, we think we get
things, but the bytes of info we deal with are a pitiful remnant, an insanely
edited fragment, of the bytes that bombard us. We not only can’t bear too much
reality – try as we will, we will never even be able to see it.

And so yes, I too go along with the common wisdom here. I
project. My subconscious gets an A in “existing as Roger”, while my
consciousness gets, at most, a D+.

But I have to ponder the illusion, too. Last night, Adam was
just barely asleep, and I had turned away to read, when he made a sound that
made me turn back to him. He was, apparently, laughing in his sleep. Or
simulating laughter.

This made me laugh. My laugh is real – his is not. But…

In a famous essay, Can a horse laugh, Robert Musil reports
on seeing a horse laugh when it was tickled – although he says that this was ‘before
the war’, and maybe since the war horses have ceased to laugh. Musil describes
how he watched a groom with a curry comb make a horse laugh by tickling it on
its sensitive spot, its shoulder blades. The horse acted “exactly like a
peasant girl” who you would try to tickle – this was, remember, the ancien
regime, which still existed pre-1914 – by moving out of the way and swatting
with his muzzle at the comb. When that didn’t work:

“But the boy took the advantage. And when his curry comb got
near the shoulder, the horse couldn’t stand it anymore. It turned around on its
legs, its whole body shook, and it pulled its lips back from its teeth, as far
as it could. For a second, it behaved exaclty like a person who has been tickled so much that he can’t laugh anymore.
The learned skeptic will object that it couldn’t have laughed in the first
place. I’d respond to him that this is correct insofar as the groom was the one
of the two who neighed the most from laughter every time. This does seem in
fact to be a unique hjuman capacity, that is, to be able to neigh from
laughter.”

And I haven’t even gotten to how Adam balls up his little
fists when he sleeps and melts my heart.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.